13 replies to this topic

[nathaniel_kelso]

I have created an informal survey to satisfy my personal curiosity if anyone actually uses SVG today and, if so, for what purpose. There was a time late 90s when SVG seemed to be a competitor to Flash, but that time seems to have come and gone, or has it?

The survey will stay open till the end of January 2008. Results posted in February to my blog. Thanks!

There are 10 questions total: Click Here to take survey

[Hans van der Maarel]

Do you think it's still worth the effort to use SVG? Since Adobe bought Macromedia, support for SVG is going to decline... browser plug-in won't be supported after 2009

[CHART]

SVG is build on the xml synthax.
SVG can easily be used for web base data binding. For example, Flash can parse and render xml ( an SVG file) on the fly. In return xml data can easily be sent to a Server. So frequently updated data (e.g. a tornado path) could be sent on a regular basis to a Server in SVG format and rendered in a Flash ready base map holder.
Further more Illustrator supports SVG.

This being said, I don't think that a building a complete SVG graphic (map) to be viewed on the web via a viewer (more so now that Abobe has dropped their viewer) has a future.

my two cents on SVG

[Sky Schemer]

SVG is build on the xml synthax.

I think that's enough of a reason to dump SVG.

[peanut]

My two cents on Flash/SVG:

I think in the past before the widespread use of AJAX to make responsive browser based applications Flash and SVG were necessary to provide for a good user experience. These days you can make responsive applications in the browser without using Flash or SVG. Also getting a Flash application indexed in the search engines is problematic.

It also looks like Microsoft is looking to compete with Flash with its new Silverlight tools.

Rich

[CHART]

Sky... not sure that major GIS vendors have adopted the same dump it attitude with regards to xml.

http://www.esri.com/.../about/xml.html

Rich, I agree. There are numerous other solutions and a SVG-Flash combo is probably not the best.

[Sky Schemer]

Sky... not sure that major GIS vendors have adopted the same dump it attitude with regards to xml.

Well, they do have to remain buzzword-compliant.

[peanut]

Sky... not sure that major GIS vendors have adopted the same dump it attitude with regards to xml.

Well, they do have to remain buzzword-compliant.

Just curious. What do you have against XML?

Think we will be using XML more and more. KML is a flavor of XML and will be a major data source going into the future.

Rich

[ELeFevre]

Sky... not sure that major GIS vendors have adopted the same dump it attitude with regards to xml.

Well, they do have to remain buzzword-compliant.

Just curious. What do you have against XML?

I'm wondering the same thing.

[Sky Schemer]

I'm wondering the same thing.

It's a horribly bloated, inefficient, and overly-complex for what you get. Somehow, people have managed to take the worst possible storage medium (written text), strip away its only advantage (human readability), and then tout the result as a net gain. I suppose it's fine as a markup language, but for arbitrary data structures it hardly seems like a good plan.

[Matthew Hampton]

Thanks for making this survey Nathanial! I have been very curious about the growth/demise of SVG as well. Some folks over in Germany (A. Neumann & crowd at carto.net) piqued my interest in SVG several years ago with a very impressive interactive map of Tuerlersee (not working now?).

I had figured SVG would create huge advancements in the storage/retrieval of vector maps/data. When I found the MapView plug-in for ArcGIS (8.1 back then), I thought SVG would become more widely adopted. Alas, it seems Flash stole SVG's momentum. I had heard that the US military routinely uses SVG, and ArcGIS 9.2 (finally) supports it.

Where's the love?

[frax]

I think that the adobe svg plug-in and other software accepts gzip compressed xml which makes it quite compact, so bloatedness is not a valid complaint. On the web we make sure that our web-servers serve all text compressed anyways?

That advantade with xml graphics/svg is that it Is very easy to separate presentation, behaviour and semantics and that custom clients/servers can easily be setup to create/consume the stuff. With flash you are limited to the flash client pretty much.

[Sky Schemer]

I think that the adobe svg plug-in and other software accepts gzip compressed xml which makes it quite compact, so bloatedness is not a valid complaint. On the web we make sure that our web-servers serve all text compressed anyways?

That advantade with xml graphics/svg is that it Is very easy to separate presentation, behaviour and semantics and that custom clients/servers can easily be setup to create/consume the stuff. With flash you are limited to the flash client pretty much.

Compressed bloat is still bloat. The problem here is that XML is a document model, not a data model. Yet people insist on using the screwdriver as a hammer, anyway.

I also don't understand the fascination with making the Web browser a kitchen-sink application, especially when we can't even get the biggest players to render basic HTML and CSS the same way.

[Hans van der Maarel]

Compressed bloat is still bloat. The problem here is that XML is a document model, not a data model. Yet people insist on using the screwdriver as a hammer, anyway.

In addition to that, it relies heavily on schema documents... Which can be nested... Which makes it very difficult for a human being to understand what's going on. Also, if even one of those schema documents is missing, you're in trouble.